Forget 21st Century skills - revive 18th Century skills

A mantra (that has now turned into an empty trope) among educators who need a serious sounding phrase to rattle around in conferences and reports is ‘21st Century Skills’. I hear it often, almost always in some overlong, text-heavy Powerpoint presentation at an educational conference, accompanied by a cocktail of 'C' words  - collaboration, communication, creativity, critical skills. Can the real world really be that alliterative?

But does this idee fixe bear scrutiny? In a nice piece of work by Stepahnie Otttenheijm, she asked some youngsters (radical eh?) what 21st C skills they thought they’d need. Not one of the usual suspects came up. They were less vague, much bolder and far more realistic. Rather than the usual 'C' suspects and abstract nouns, they wanted to know how to handle and maintain a strong digital identity, be nice, recognise what’s learnt outside school, learn how to search, use Facebook privacy settings and so on - exceedingly practical these youngsters. My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults. It is schools, colleges and Universities that need to be dragged into the 21st century, not their users.
This 21st C agenda is actually quite dangerous. It can harm learners, especially the disadvantaged by giving them the illusion of progress. Knowledge and skills are not separable like oil and water, they are deeply entwined with most critical think and problem solving requiring a depth off knowledge. Willingham point's to the disastrous adoption of 'New Math', a let straight into problem solving which abandoned necessary, prior knowledge. 21st C skills promise short-cuts, short-term gains but at a heavy cost - long-term progress.

18th century skills

I'm all for abandoning this ‘21st century’ label - we're 15% into it already and education has become less interested in these skills, more academic, more test-driven, PISA obsessed and has failed to use the technology that we all use, even during the dull lectures we're still fed. Forget futurists, I want some educational archaeologists that revive 18th century enlightenment values.

Samuel Johnson said, "Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. If your attention fails, and you miss a part of a lecture, it is lost; you cannot go back as you do upon a book". The figures who led the charge against the religious basis of schooling and universities in the enlightenment were people like Johnson, who existed outside of the system, enjoyed unorthodox opinion and encouraged real critical thinking. As he said, "Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect".
What drove him and other enlightenment figures, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, was a more sympathetic view of the learner but above all the basic idea of self-improvement and education as a progressive force.

David Hume, my favourite enlightenment figure, and the greatest ever English speaking philosopher, who was rejected by Edinburgh University for being an 'unbeliever', would be shocked to find that find religious studies, and not philosophy, is still taught in schools. "Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge" he claimed.
Why teach the love of a set of incompatible systems of certainty, rather than the love of critical thought, a sceptical disposition and autonomous thinking. On learning he was incredibly progressive, observing that "it is the content, not the person who matters... as you know there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in books, and there is nothing to be required in order to reap all possible advantages from them, but an order and choice in reading them...I see no reason why we should either go to a University, more than to any other place, or ever trouble ourselves about the learning or capacity of the professor."
I'd prefer young people to have the skills that keep them sceptical, critical and independent. Genuine inquiry needs that enlightenment spirit of curiosity, good analytic skills and abandonment of dogmatic positions. To be honest, I suspect they have this in abundance. Like their enlightenment forefathers they don't want to lock up knowledge in institutions but share, discuss, communicate, even hang out in coffee shops.

Collaboration and sharing

Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes – it’s an obsession. They text, message, chat, post, comment, snapchat, whatsapp, use Instagram, Facebook and tools you're likely never to have heard of. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there’s Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, Vine, Vimeo, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in teams, often international, when playing computer games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. 

Then along comes someone who wants to teach them a 21st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned. I’m hugely amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we always have the skills we want to teach. There is no area of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education. Teaching and lecturing are largely lone-wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution. The culture of NIH (Not Invented Here) is endemic. Many educators far from being consistently collaborative, have a sneering attitude towards online collaboration.

Communication

Again, we live in the age of abundant communication. There’s been a renaissance in communication and writing among young people, who have become masters at smart, concise dialogue. The mobile has taken communication to new levels of use and sophistication. They know what channel to use, whether it’s archived (txts & Facebook) or not (snapchat), synchronous (realtime voice) or asynchronous (access when you want). They can also handle multiple, open channels at the same time.

What do we educators have to offer on this front? Whiteboards? Some groupwork round a table with felt-tip pens? Not one single teacher in the schools my sons attended has an email address available for parents. I’ve attended innumerable educational conferences where only a handful of the participants used Twitter.

Problem solving

Problem solving is a complex skill and there are serious techniques that you can learn to problem solve, such as breakdown, root-cause analysis, supplemented by good documentation, issues' lists, request registers and so on. If you've been through serious project management training or lived for a while in a heavyweight IT environment, where serious coding takes place, you'll meet people who are skilled at this. 

I’m not at all convinced that many subject-focused teachers and lecturers know much about these generic techniques. Problem solving for a maths teacher may be factoring equations of finding a proof but they’re the last people I’d call on to solve anything else in life. Do teachers actually know what generic problem solving is or is it seen as some skill that is acquired through osmosis when a group of kids get together in a project to make, for example, a movie?

Creativity

Beware of big, abstract nouns. This one has become a cipher for almost everything and, I fear, nothing. I have no problem with art, drama and other departments talking about creativity but why does creativity have to be injected into all subjects and education. When it comes to creativity, my own view is that the music, drama and other creative skills my own offspring have gained, have mostly been acquired outside of school. You can listen to as many Sir Ken Robinson talks as you wish, it's still a vague concept backed up with little more than his easy-going, jokey rhetoric.

Critical thinking

I have some sympathy with this one, as critical thinking is often well taught in good schools and universities, but it needs high quality teaching and the whole curriculum and system of assessment needs to adjust to this need. However, as Arun has shown, there is evidence that in our Universities, this is not happening. Arun (2011), in a study that tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students, who entered 24 four-year colleges, showed that Universities were failing badly on the three skills they studied; critical thinking, complex reasoning and communications. This research, along with similar evidence, is laid out in their book Academically Adrift.

Digital literacy

Across the world young people have collaborated on Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to bring down entire regimes and force political change. Not one of them has been on a digital literacy course. And, in any case, who are these older teachers who know enough about digital literacy to teach these young people? And how do they teach it – through collaborative, communication on media using social media – NO. By and large, in educational institutions, this stuff is shunned, restricted, even banned. We learn digital literacy by doing, largely outside of academe.

Conclusion

Beneath all this talk of 21st C skills, is not a view of autonomy and independent skills and thinking. Isn’t it just a rather old, top-down, command and control idea – that we know what’s best for them? Isn’t it just the old master-pupil model dressed up in new clothes? In this case, I suspect the pupils may know a tad more than the masters.

There’s also a brazen conceit here, that educators know, with certainty, that these are the chosen skills for the next 100 years. Are we simply fetishising the skills of the current management class? Was there a sudden break between these skills in the last century compared to this century? No. What’s changed is the need to understand the wider range of possible communication channels. This comes through mass adoption and practice, not formal education.

It is an illusion that these skills were ever, or even can be, taught at school. Teachers have enough on their plate without being given this burden. I’ve seen no evidence that teachers have the disposition, or training, to teach these skills. In fact, in universities, I’d argue that smart, highly analytic, research-driven academics tend, in my experience, often to have low skills in these areas. Formal educational environments are not the answer. Pushing rounded, sophisticated, informal skills into a square, subject-defined environment is not the answer. It’s our schools and universities, not young people, who need to be dragged into the 21st century.

Virtual Reality 'Game of Thrones' on Vive's stunning rival to Oculus

VR is a amazing medium not a mere gadget. I’ve been playing around with the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 then Development Kit 2 for over a year, helped get some learning applications funded and see it playing a real role in ‘learning by doing’. Having demoed it to hundreds of people across Europe and in Africa, all I can say is that the most common reaction is ‘Awesome!”. What we’re all waiting on is the consumer launch.

Learning potential

In learning we all yearn for something that can really hold sustained attention, induce intense emotion, allow learning by doing, provide relevant context, enable transfer, increase retention, provide cognitive swap and above all, allow you to do things that are impossible in the real world. These are just seven principles in learning that suggest it has huge potential. Here's a brief selection.

Consumer tech

But what makes technology based learning fly is its cultural acceptance. The technology is always ahead of the more sluggish sociology. We’re all now comfortable with search on the internet, Wikipedia, hyperlinked content, learning from YouTube, TED and Khan videos, contributing within a network of professionals on social media. Whenever a sustained, irreversible, global, consumer base develops, learning applications follow.

This is why the Facebook purchase of Oculus Rift was sosignificant. They were first to get on their racing bike but there’s a peloton forming and the race constantly changes as new challengers emerge from the pack. Since that $2.3 billion dollar announcement, the other industry giants have gone goggle-eyed and pushed their R&D teams to get something to market soon. Samsung, Microsoft and others know that this shift from 2D to 3D may be a huge opportunity, as a new medium emerges. That doesn’t happen very often – paper print, radio, film, TV, 2d web…… what’s next?

Valve’s top ten features

Now another big consortium has emerged as pacemaker – Valve & HTC. This is big news for the following 10 reasons:

1. HTC are making the screen

2. Two 1200x1080 displays

3. Refresh rate of 90 frames a second

4. Great field of view

5. Stem VR base station for avatar control (within 15x15 ft room)

6. Wireless HTC controllers for each hand (gloves?)

7. Controller’s positions tracked

8. Headset is very light

9. Google, HBO on  board

10. Release promised in 2015

This is a big step up from the Oculus Rift DK2 with a significant technology difference. The Valve headset contains cameras that track your movement, rather than the Oculus’s cameras tracking the headset. It’s the Oculus tracking in reverse, although it still has the accelerometer and gyroscope.

There’s a pre-release video, that’s not so great, but the launch is this week (2-5 March) at the Game Developer’s Conference. Their promise – developer’s kit this Spring, then release ‘holiday 2015’, by which I take to be Christmas.

Entertainment

One thing most vendors realise is that this is just about gaming. The games market is huge and can drive this forward but the entertainment, education and health markets are bigger. This is not a gadget – it’s a new medium, applicable in almost every domain you can imagine. HBO are in on the Valve act, NBA in on Oculus - so expect some Game of Thrones VR and court-side viewing on launch. TV and film may never be the same again.

Conclusion

This is great news, but let’s not get too carried away. This is a long race, not a velodrome sprint. Competition has driven this forward. Consumer VR will be here, as I thought, this year. It all comes down to marketing, price and quality of the product. As HTC CEO Peter Chou announced when showing the Vive for the first time on stage “We believe virtual reality will totally transform the way we interact with the world. It will become a mainstream experience for general consumers. The possibilities are limitless.”

PS

Some videos showing VR in education:

VR and 'presence'

Teach history with VR

Teach physics with VR

Teach biology with VR

Amazing reaction on Oculus

What can we learn from the Million dollar teacher?

Richard Spencer's a science teacher from Middlesburgh, who teaches biology using dance, songs, games and so on. He’s up for the $1 million Global Teacher of the Year Award. I’m not sure about these awards, another is the WISE Prize for Education at $500k. For me it’s all about the learning not the teaching. By focusing on the teacher, the articles read like lottery winner stories with no real analysis of what they do. Most teachers will know about the $1 million prize and Richard has had lots of publicity, but how many teachers actually know, in detail, what he or his students do? How many are replicating his methods?

Theory and practice

Richard's work does surface some important pieces of learning theory that fly in the face of those who see teaching as a craft, not to be polluted by science, research or learning theories. He teaches biology which, at A-level, has some pretty complex language, structures and processes, primarily in molecular biology. Rather than stand and talk at his sitting students, hoping that this stuff will stick, he 'elaborates' the concepts so that they really do stick, in the practical sense of retention and recall. In short, he uses some pretty basic psychology and learning theory to blend his courses.

Blended learning

What does he do? Well it’s neither new nor radical. It’s a ‘blend’ of experiments, videos, models, role play, games, poems, songs and dance to make his lessons more memorable for students. He refuses to just lecture, although he does include some straight talks in his teaching. Cleverly, for some complex processes he recognizes that role-playing those processes will result in higher retention and recall. For example, in his songs and dances, they wear coloured bibs to represent chromosomes and DNA neucleotides. In his DNA Boogie, the structure is made explicit by becoming part of the molecule and in the Meiosis Square Dances, students act out how chromosomes are shared between cells as tissue grow. The students become the chemical structures, then move and interact with each other to represent what happens in that biological process. He claims that, “years down the line they can still recite the songs, even after 15 years”.

Elaboration

What is actually going on here? In terms of learning theory his method could be summed up as the use of blended learning that includes lots of ‘elaboration’ to improve retention and recall. He is optimising his blend, matching elaboration techniques with the learning outcomes. For simple naming the learners stand and chant the structure using their bodies and arms as cues. For processes, they line up and move around. For chemical interactions, they start to interact with each other in groups. This is not blended teaching, it’s blended learning. There's a difference.

What helps here is a simple understanding of Declarative (semantic & episodic) and Nondeclarative (skills, priming, conditioning) memory. Put simply, the difference between knowing that and knowing how. Once you understand these different forms of memory you can blend more successfully, even using one form of memory to help another. Elaboration, along with spaced practice is little understood in education but it can be incredibly useful for novice learners, who, despite what we think of the curriculum, do have to retain and recall large amounts of knowledge across a wide range of subjects.

Body as a cue factory

In singing songs and using your own body as a “basic memory trigger’ Richard Spencer is using the theory of ‘cues’ to improve memory. This theory was expanded by Tulving and others to show that recall is aided by ‘cues’ which are a bit like the handles on suitcases, in that they can be used to haul out larger amounts of content. Cues can be things that you already know, such as your own body, episodic memories such as the route you take to school or the layout of your own house. In particular, the body can be used for a huge amount of any biology curriculum. The advantage of using your own body is that this is the one thing you can take with you into any exam. It’s a travelling cue factory. 

Learn by doing

Then there's a well researched area, that is largely ignored in teaching practice, learning by doing, The simple idea that ‘doing’ results in deep processing, by using other channels and forms of memory, is well known. Yet we insist on getting students to sit down for hours on end while we ply them with information that appeals to only one form of memory – semantic. What Richard is doing here is linking semantic information ‘words, concepts and processes’ to songs and dances that act as cues for recalling that semantic knowledge.

Practice

An additional benefit of Richard's blended, elaborative, cued approach, is that the learners can go off and practice these songs and dances themselves, even if it is just recall and rehearsal in their heads. They offer ample opportunity for rehearsal and practice, leading to reinforcement into long-term memory and better recall.

Conclusion

Richard is not charismatic, he’s enthusiastic. In fact he’s so ordinary, if you watch the videos, it all seems a little gauche. As he says “It’s not about creating a celebrity teacher but good teaching…. getting people to talk about teaching globally”. But the key issue here is that it’s not about him, it’s about what the learners DO. That’s why I think these prizes are misplaced. This is not about great teachers, it’s about better learning. This is not about blended teaching, it’s about blended learning by DOING, with a hefty dose of elaboration – well known and researched topics. The problem is the lack of good theory informing practice and relying on excuses, such as 'teaching is a craft or practice'. This simpely begs the question - what practices? Wouldn’t it be better, not to send Richard careering round schools, teaching other teachers his dances, but to capture this stuff and share it through online CPD? To this end I’ve tried to collate a few links that may be useful.

DNA Boogie dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsZ7rUlnlP8

Meiosis Square Dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLhTtVdDhIE

For a step by step explanation of the dance:

http://meiosistheprocess.wikispaces.com/file/view/Meiosis+Square+Dance.swf

DNA/RNA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuTyX4NKBRA

Holy shit – swearing in conference presentations works!

If you know me, or have heard me speak at conferences, you’ll know that I’m partial to the odd swear word. This is never planned, it is part of my everyday speech. I should add that I’m Scottish, which far from being an excuse, is simply a description of a culture more attuned to swearing than more mild-mannered England. Billy Connolly, a genius when it comes to oral delivery, could never have come from England. Ireland maybe, England never.

Swearing study

Let me start with some science. I’m not saying this study is definitive but it is at least one study, with a control, that shows the beneficial effect of swear words in presentations. A speech about 'lowering tuition fees' was delivered to three groups :

Group 1: Used ‘Damn’ at the start

Group 2: Used 'Damn' at the end

Group 3. No swearing at all

The swear word at the start or end had the most effect (defined as the ‘persuasiveness’ of the speech). It also enhanced the perceived intensity of the speaker. Interestingly, it neither enhanced or damaged their credibility.

Why I swear

I don't swear because this study gives me an excuse to juice up presentation style. I occasionally swear because I’ve always felt that swear words add something special – they’re the magic dust of language. 

First, when unexpected, they jolt people to attention. Who would deny that this is useful in the anodyne and often mind-numbingly, boring world of lectures, conferences and presentations. Second, attention is a necessary condition for learning – it aids retention.

Third, they have meanings which other words do not have. Shakespeare is full of filth and swear words. When I described Gove as someone who fitted his job like a ‘prick in a codpiece’, I felt as that this was a pretty good analogy.

Fourth, they’re emotive terms and if, like me, you argue that lectures and talks are hopeless on the transmission of knowledge or skills, but strong when affective, attitudinal or emotive, then they can play a vital role.

Fifth, it is time we started to puncture the pomposity and break the sheer boredom we witness at conferences and lectures. I’m not fond of those that cower behind lecterns, reading from pre-typed notes. Above all, I’m not fond of being bored. Which of us has never experienced the excruciating, almost painful levels of boredom at lectures and conferences?

Sixth, if you’re ‘offended’ by the occasional swear word, I’m offended by your lack of sensitivity toward freedom of speech and the cultural/linguistic norms of others. I find the censorship of ordinary language offensive.

Seventh, I don't give a fuck.

Blow-back

Having often sworn in presentations, I’ve received blow-back for swearing. At ALT, many moons ago, I was roundly tweckled for daring to suggest that lectures are an ineffective form of teaching (how radical). All I can say is that this talk led to me talking on this subject for a number of years ar universities all over the world. The YouTube versions reached over 25,000 people, and on the whole, it stimulated a pile of debate.
A second example was in a webinar for an Americal learning organisation about VR, where I wanted to show a video of a girl swearing while killing zombies in a VR game. They wanted it out of the presentation. As I was doing this for free, I said no. They came back and said, let's do it with  warning at the front. I said fine, as long as it's not me doing the warning. In the end we went ahead and there was no warning. What a load of baloney.

Conclusion

My friend, who was at the time a Board Member of Channel 4, told me of an instance of a game, where you have to get a pre-agreed word into your conference speech. At the annual Edinburgh TV Festival he told me of a speaker he knew who had to say ‘cunt’, which he did by asking the audience what words were banned by the BBC. See what I did there – swore at the start and the end – that’s science folks.